Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  The merchandizing of Barbra Streisand was about to begin.

  2.

  Who cared that the house wasn’t even half full? The show was only in previews. There was still time for word to get out and bring in the crowds. Besides, how could Barbra be upset about anything when she’d just gotten her picture in the New York Times? Even if they’d spelled her name with three a’s, and even if the photo wasn’t all that flattering—her mouth was open midsong—it was still her, and no doubt everyone in Brooklyn (and a certain ex-boyfriend in Manhattan) had seen it.

  On stage at the Gramercy Arts Theatre, Barbra had just gotten a big laugh from the small audience for telling her lover in one skit that she was pregnant. The lead-up to the punch line was a group of jocks bragging about their conquests with all the pretty girls at school while their nebbish friend listens, seemingly in envy. But it’s only the nebbish who turns out to have gotten any action, for after everyone has left, the homely tagalong of the pretty girls (Barbra) comes up to him and announces, “Barry, I’m pregnant.” Only Barbra would have appreciated the irony of the boy’s name.

  Most of her bits in Harry Stoones were in the first act. She played an Indian maiden, sang a goofy song called “Value” about being in love with a guy called Harold Mengert, and lampooned, in two different skits, the blues and New Jersey. So after her “I’m pregnant” line, which led off the second act, she mostly just sat backstage. But she was “just happy to be acting,” one friend understood.

  And that photo in the Times! How could she not be happy? Barbra might be listed last in the credits for the show, but it was her picture with which the Times had chosen to announce Stoones’s opening—not Sands’s, not Dom DeLuise’s. No one could be quite sure how that had happened, but in addition to the official mimeographs issued from the show’s publicists, newspaper editors were also receiving notices from Don Softness promoting PM East’s latest discovery, a brilliant singer and offbeat character named Barbra Streisand. In choosing to go with a picture of the television personality, the Times was counting on the fact that Barbra might actually be more recognizable to its readers than the revue’s other, ostensibly bigger names.

  As Barbra rejoined her castmates on stage for the final curtain call, taking her bows as the meager audience got to its feet, there was a sense in the air that it was she—last on the bill, the butt of so many of the jokes—who was the fastest on the move.

  3.

  At Bob’s little “postshow get-together” after Harry Stoones’s opening night on Saturday, October 21, Barbra seemed less focused on the reviews than on the fact that Barré had come to see the show. The critics hadn’t been kind. The reviewer who’d shown up from the Times, Lewis Funke, was perhaps the least simpatico with a revue that strove so earnestly to be avant-garde. Funke was a former sports reporter and, at fifty, part of another generation entirely than the kids cavorting up on stage. If Funke gave them a negative review, which everyone expected, there would likely never be another evening with Harry Stoones.

  But the fear of closing didn’t seem to be in the forefront of Barbra’s mind. Rather, she was more interested to learn from Bob that Barré had taken notes on her performance. Instead of being offended, she was eager to see what her former boyfriend had written. Holed up in a corner of Bob’s new apartment—he’d taken a gorgeous place on Gramercy Park South just a few blocks from the theater, with sixteen-foot ceilings, a Steinway grand piano, and enormous windows that overlooked the park—Barbra pored over Barré’s notes. He thought she’d been “great,” beautifully “underplaying her numbers.” Her voice had been terrific, he said, especially on “Value”—the Harold Mengert number—but it was her timing and her acting that had really impressed him and that was what mattered most to Barbra. Barré’s opinion, Bob realized, was still “very important to her.” Part of her had moved on from that heartbreak, but another part remained tethered to this man who had meant so much.

  For a performer faced with the closing of her show, Barbra seemed to Bob to possess remarkable sangfroid. It wasn’t just Another Evening with Harry Stoones that had proved to be a disappointment either. She’d also recently learned that Goddard Lieberson wouldn’t be offering her a record deal. But Barbra seemed calm, collected, confident. That fall, many of her friends sensed that she was getting very close to something big. And so as one show faced the ax, Barbra seemed to roll with the punches and turned her determined eyes to another—the appropriately named What’s in It for Me?

  4.

  The temperatures were mild on Thursday, November 16, but the skies had turned a solid slate gray, pregnant with rain, which only made Jerome Weidman’s mood all the bleaker. The novelist-playwright had just come from his doctor’s office where he’d been told he needed an abdominal operation. He should have gone home and rested, but instead he took a taxi up to the St. James Theatre on Forty-fourth Street. Auditions were being held that day for the show he was scheduled to start rehearsing in five weeks, which Weidman had adapted from his 1937 novel, I Can Get It for You Wholesale.

  It wasn’t as if the auditions that day were all that important. Most of the bigger parts had already been chosen. Weidman could have, “without compunction or hesitation,” left the selection of these less vital players in the very capable hands of the director, Arthur Laurents. But after writing the books for such successful shows as Fiorello! and Tenderloin, he had learned that it was “as impossible to become partially involved with a show” as it was “to partially fall in love.”

  Laurents was already at the theater. The director sat in the audience, watching the hopefuls on the stage. Although he’d written the books for many of Broadway’s biggest hits of recent years—The Time of the Cuckoo, Gypsy, West Side Story—this was only his second time directing, and his first time directing someone else’s material. When David Merrick had asked him to take the helm, Laurents, never one to be impressed by hype—his or anyone else’s—took it in stride. Merrick, he believed, “must have been turned down by the big-name directors he went after first.” He accepted the job, despite his belief that the script—the story of a scheming con man named Harry Bogen—was “flawed” and “unmarked for success,” because he’d always wanted to work with Merrick. He also believed he could make something special out of that flawed script.

  Sitting there that day, watching the aspiring actors troop across the stage at the St. James Theatre, Laurents felt confident he could pull it off—so long as Weidman didn’t fight him too much. He considered that unlikely. Of the two, Laurents was known as the greater wordsmith, with a body of work that also included such esteemed films as Rope, Anastasia, and Bonjour Tristesse. Weidman, for his part, had never written anything to top Wholesale, his first novel, and his one major film had been the middlebrow melodrama The Damned Don’t Cry, starring Joan Crawford.

  If any script battles were to come, however, they lay in the future, so when Weidman arrived at the theater, he and Laurents greeted each other warmly. There were backslaps and good words also with Harold Rome, the lyricist, and Herbert Ross, the choreographer. For the moment, everything was smiles and handshakes, and the men putting on this show for David Merrick settled down into the darkened red-velvet auditorium and turned their attention to the stage.

  All auditions followed a similar pattern. The applicant would trudge up to the stage and stand beneath the glare of a bare bulb while the stage manager shouted out a name. To Weidman, “the names of all unknown actors and actresses, when heard for the first time in a darkened theater at an audition,” sounded like anagrams “composed of letters taken from the sides of Lithuanian Pullman cars.” With such incomprehensible cacophony, the name “Barbra Streisand” reached Weidman’s ears.

  Barbra wore “a fur coat . . . a combination of tans, browns, yellows, and whites, all swirling around in great shapeless blotches, like a child’s painting.” From below the coat Weidman discerned “a couple of very shapely legs.” Laurents astutely pegged the coat as “an old movie-star wrap,” and
Barbra was indeed intentionally hoping to evoke a bit of old-time movie-star glamour. Dressing for the audition with Bob, she’d chosen a “fabulous” caracul coat. The lamb’s fur was also ornamented with a bit of fox. The coat had come from a thrift shop, but it still looked “pristine,” Bob thought, “like something Dietrich would have worn.”

  Yet for this particular audition Barbra would play the white goddess only on the outside. When she opened the fur coat, she revealed a simple wool dress, hardly the high couture most would-be actresses wore to auditions. Her hair wasn’t coiffed either, but was instead knotted in an old-maidish bun on the top of her head. Laurents got precisely the impression she wanted him to get: “Spinster incarnate,” he thought to himself when he got his first good look at her.

  There was a method to Barbra’s madness, of course. The only role of any consequence left to cast—and the only one she was remotely qualified for—was the harried, homely secretary Miss Marmelstein. Barbra knew exactly what she was doing.

  And so she performed a brilliant routine of what Laurents immediately recognized as “calculated spontaneity.” First came the “elaborate shedding” of the coat, revealing her “gawky, disorganized body.” Then there was a complicated bit with the sheet music, produced from a red briefcase and held comically to her waist. Extravagant whispers to the accompanist followed. Then the kid asked a stagehand for a chair. She was nervous, she claimed, and wanted to sit, but Laurents thought her nerves, while possibly real “somewhere deep down,” were part of her routine. As the chair was wheeled over to the center of the stage, Barbra marched to meet it—while her sheet music, taped together, suddenly accordioned after her. Laurents shook his head in bemusement. “Funny, attention-getting, a good trick,” he thought, especially since it was punctuated by a “trilling giggle of feigned surprise.”

  Sitting back in his seat, the director thought this Streisand kid was maybe “too much,” maybe “trying too hard.” She was entertaining, but he was on to her tricks. Everything she did, Laurents observed, was staged. When she sat down in the chair, she didn’t just sit—“she sprawled in it, flung her legs out, took them back, wrapped her arms around them, under them, across them,” all the while “elaborately chewing gum.” When it came time for her to sing, she took the gum out of her mouth and—using a bit of business as old as her act itself—proceeded to stick it under the chair. (Or at least she seemed to. When Laurents checked later, there was no gum.) Laurents just rolled his eyes. “She’d better have a voice,” he thought to himself.

  From farther back in the theater, another set of eyes watched her, eyes belonging to a young man who could barely believe he was there at all. Six foot three, two hundred pounds, Elliott Gould had leaped from the chorus line of Irma la Douce right into the starring role of this production, pushing aside such established names as Tony Franciosa and Laurence Harvey, both of whom had been considered. Gould’s casting had surprised him as much as it did Broadway insiders. The twenty-three-year-old was almost a complete unknown, and it was on his untried shoulders, broad as they might be, that the entire weight of a David Merrick vehicle was now being placed. So it was with considerable fascination that Gould watched this “fantastic freak” —his words—cavort up on the stage. This Barbra Streisand might be “the weirdo of all times” —his own words again—but she seemed to have reservoirs of confidence that he envied, with none of the self-doubts that kept him awake at night.

  Barbra had plenty of her own self-doubts, of course, but she kept them well hidden. What people saw was that old ferocious belief that she had to make it to the top or go nowhere at all. At this particular moment, that belief was being fueled by the adrenaline produced by the reviews for Another Evening with Harry Stoones. True enough that the show had closed after only one official performance, and true, too, that the stodgy Lewis Funke hadn’t even mentioned Barbra in his scathing critique in the New York Times. “None too stimulating,” he’d concluded about the show, an opinion shared by reviewers for the New York Post and Herald Tribune. But others, a little more in tune with Harry Stoones’s offbeat sensibility, had responded very differently, both to the show and to Barbra. Edith Oliver in The New Yorker had thought Stoones was “quick, flippant [and] sometimes bright and original,” and she “particularly admired” Barbra. Martin Gottfried in Women’s Wear Daily, who’d been one of those hooting and whistling for Barbra right from the start at the Bon Soir, had proclaimed Harry Stoones “gleeful” and “riotous,” and observed, “Barbra Streisand has been a fine singer for some time and continues to be one.” Michael Smith in the Village Voice had gone so far as to declare that no one in the cast, not even Sands or DeLuise, had been “quite strong enough” to play opposite Barbra. But such raves appeared days after the show had closed, too late to do any good.

  Too late for the show, perhaps, but not for Barbra. By the time she strode into the St. James Theatre, it was with an air of supreme confidence. It hadn’t been just her voice the critics had applauded, but her acting: Variety thought Barbra had shown “excellent flair for dropping a dour blackout gag.” Now, with that same sort of flair, she sauntered up onto the St. James stage, playing the part of the eccentric kid, a role that had worked so well for her on PM East, a persona Don Softness, her shrewd new publicist, had encouraged. It was shtick that bordered on being disrespectful—the well-executed slip of her music, for example, or her demand for a chair—but it never quite crossed that line. Instead, it was funny. Different. It got the men in power to sit up and pay attention. Now all that was left for Barbra to do was sing. And that, of course, was the easy part.

  The timing couldn’t have been better. Barbra was set to open at the Blue Angel that night, so her voice was in top form. She was also fortunate that Peter Daniels had moved over to the Angel from the Bon Soir; he’d helped Barbra expand her repertoire. So she could have chosen to sing any number of songs for her audition. She went with the broadly comic “Value,” which had been such a success for her in Harry Stoones. “Call me a schlemiel, call me a brain with a missing wheel . . .” Both Laurents and Weidman found the song delightful, and burst into applause when Barbra was done. When Laurents asked if she had a ballad, Barbra briskly replied that she’d sing “Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair?”—which they all knew and approved of. Halfway through the song, as they all sat silently listening, Harold Rome leaned over his seat and whispered to Laurents, “Geez, she’s really something, isn’t she?”

  She was. Laurents agreed Barbra was something special, but Miss Marmelstein was supposed to be fifty years old, and this kid would barely be twenty by the time the show opened. Still, she was good—very good—with exactly the kind of “Jewish sensibility” the show needed—which, no doubt, Barbra had been counting on. What’s in It for Me? was a show where her Jewishness would be an asset, not a liability. Without that cultural flavor, the show lost everything, a fact Laurents understood very well. Back in 1951, Twentieth Century-Fox had turned Weidman’s novel into a movie, keeping the original title, I Can Get It for You Wholesale, but practically nothing else. Harry Bogen was turned into Harriet Boyd in a star vehicle for the titian-haired, Irish-Swedish Susan Hayward. The film was a flop. This new version, Laurents knew, had to retain its gritty, urban, ethnic identity, and for this, Barbra Streisand fit perfectly.

  Still, he also knew that she wasn’t what Merrick had in mind for the part, so for the moment he just thanked her and said they might call her back. That was enough for Barbra. She hadn’t been rejected out of hand; she still had a chance. She left the stage in a bubbly, effusive mood, inviting everyone to come see her at the Blue Angel. And call her, yes, please, call her! She finally had a phone number all her own, she told everyone, and she sang it out with exuberance.

  Everyone laughed. It was the perfect shtick with which to end her audition. Laurents made sure to write her number down, while several rows behind him in the theater, someone else did so as well.

  5.

  Later that evening, leaving her sublet on
West Eighteenth Street to head uptown to the Blue Angel, Barbra heard her telephone ring.

  She picked up and heard a male voice.

  “You said you wanted to get calls, so I called,” the man said. “You were brilliant.”

  It was Elliott Gould. The big, gangly lead from What’s in It for Me? Barbra thanked him, and that was the extent of their conversation. She hung up the phone and told Terry Leong what had just happened. Gould was the star of the show; maybe he made such courtesy calls to everyone who auditioned. But Terry told her that wasn’t likely. The guy would be on the phone all night if that were the case.

  At the audition, Barbra had barely noticed Gould. There’d been no real feeling about him one way or the other. Gould wasn’t really Barbra’s type, which tended toward more handsome, polished men. Gould was, instead, long-limbed and lantern-jawed, with a nose that some likened to a large dill pickle. But he had called her. He had called her and told her that she was brilliant. It left an impression. How could it not? It made her, friends said, curious, at the very least, to see Gould again.

  6.

  The Blue Angel, with its long, rectangular shape and oddly quilted walls, left more than one performer struck by its resemblance to a coffin—an ironic analogy for a place known for giving birth to cabaret stars. From the Angel’s tiny stage the likes of Felicia Sanders, Harry Belafonte, Eartha Kitt, and Dorothy Loudon had dazzled audiences for nearly two decades. Now in the second week of her run, Barbra stepped into the spotlight dressed in a pink gingham sleeveless dress with a sequined jumper-style bodice—hardly the image of a traditional nightclub singer, but very much the mod, stylish icon Bob had been endeavoring so hard to create—and smiled at the faces in the crowd, many of whom were familiar to her this night.